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The Dept. Q Trilogy, based on three best-selling crime novels by Danish writer Jussi Adler-Olsen, draws comparisons with Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo franchise: set in Scandinavia and featuring a sullen male protagonist, it's violent, hard-boiled, and psychologically disturbing.
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With a title that translates roughly as Attaboy!, this engaging and percipient period comedy (2015) focuses on the enslavement of the Roma people in 19th-century Romania, a subject that, until recently, was seldom aired by Romanian nativists, much less condemned, and that continues to resonate in the second-class treatment of the Roma today.
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This debut feature from longtime gay-rights activist Vincent Gagliostro, about a middle-aged New York artist (Alan Cumming) making a film about the ACT UP generation and a close friend who died of AIDS, is a valuable meditation on generational differences, particularly between gay men who lived through the worst years of the AIDS crisis and those who came of age afterward.
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In this family drama from Japanese writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda, a rainstorm forces a struggling novelist (Hiroshi Abe) to reconnect with his recently widowed mother (Kirin Kiki), estranged wife (Yoko Maki), and young son at the matriarch's home.
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Canadian filmmaker John Bolton entwines the stories of two other passionate Canucks into this "musical docudrama," as he calls it, about obsession and self-actualization.
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In this woozy thriller from writer-director Tim McCann, a drug addict (Sam Trammell) becomes fixated on the idea of presenting a necklace to his estranged wife (Missy Yager) on their wedding anniversary.
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In this entrancing road movie from British filmmaker Andrea Arnold (Fish Tank), an abused teen (Sasha Lane) joins a cadre of other wayward young adults who sell magazines door-to-door across the midwest.
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Eighty-two-year-old French glaciologist Claude Lorius is the subject of this immaculately produced but cold and plodding documentary about the devastating effects of climate change.
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This beautifully photographed but slow-moving thriller dramatizes the events of Operation Anthropoid, the British military mission in which members of the Czech resistance were recruited to assassinate high-ranking Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich during World War II.
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This Spanish-Uruguayan satire (2015) about a man struggling to leave his Catholic church in Madrid offers a wry absurdist take on existential crisis without resorting to cliche.
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The title of Brigitte Sy's electric sophomore feature (2015) translates as "the anklebone," which is what the female protagonist, an Algerian-born delinquent, breaks while escaping from a French prison in the late 1950s.
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Set in Spain when the housing bubble burst in 2007—a full year before the financial crisis would be felt around the world—this 2016 musical recalls Rent and Les Misérables in that the primary catalysts for the characters breaking into song are despair and displacement.
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A woman whose brother has just died (Juliette Binoche) invites her son's girlfriend (Lou de Laâge) to stay at her sprawling Sicilian villa, and as mourners drift in and out, they await the son's arrival on Easter Sunday.
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